Blood of the Czars

by Kilian, Michael;

  “Ramsey, you’re a damned faggot!”

  “Not entirely, dear Tatiana, as you’ve good reason to know. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that I have a son, a lineal descendant whose mother is you. What matters is that I am father, grandfather, ancestor of royals.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Tatty. All these American WASP princesses whose great-grandfathers were storekeepers. All these Smith girls, Tatty, descended from meat-cart pushers. All the great fortunes, the great families of America, Tatty. They rose from dire poverty, from slime. The first Astor was a German barkeep. The first Vanderbilt piloted a Staten Island garbage scow. Gustavas Swift sold raw meat from a cart on Cape Cod. The Rockefellers came from a vermin-infested pigsty on the Rhine called Rockenfeld. You, Tatty. You are royalty. You have centuries of it in you.”

  “That’s a lot of crap, Ramsey. I’ve good reason to know.”

  “You’ve no reason at all. I’m the systematic, Socratic man, Tatty. I’ve researched your background as I have no one else’s. I’ve thought upon it, pondered it well. This is what I mean to do. I suppose what I’ve always meant to do.”

  “Do you realize that you have been a threat to my life for months now? You’ve slaughtered my friends. You tried to set me up for the worst kind of murder in Russia. You’ve made me a hopeless fugitive. Your friends, your slimy, beastly lovers, have been trying to kill me for days. And you sit here, naked, sipping rum, talking about fathering my child?”

  “Sincerely, Tatiana. It was never my arrangement with the Russian gentlemen that you were to be killed. You were merely to be tried and convicted. After the trial, you were to disappear, as though off into the gulags. Instead, you’d have been turned over to me. That was my agreement with them, Tatiana. For them, Griuchinov dead, you tried and convicted; for me, a considerable sum of money, plus you.”

  “Plus me. A little objet d’art picked up on the Russian market. And what would happen after I performed for you and produced your little heir, which thank God would probably be medically impossible for me? What would you do then? Trade me for a painting? Sell me to some brothel? Have me rendered for the chemicals in my body? Have you any idea how appalling you are?”

  “Ease up, Tatty. You’re not coming out of this so badly. You’re alive. You’re free of the Bolsheviks. You may even be able to reclaim your fortune some day. I’m ruined for good. They’re all hunting me. I’ve no clear idea yet where I can find sanctuary. I’ve only this boat. You caught me completely off balance, completely out of position. It’s damned amazing. I drop you, the fluffy-headed innocent, into this, in medias res, and whammo, it’s I who ends up hanging from the cliff.”

  “You’re just outrageous! You have no measure whatsoever of how disgusting and monstrous you are! There’s not a shred of morality to you, is there? There’s only what you want and don’t want, and you do anything you want. You stroll into innocent people’s lives and smash them up like so much crystal on the shelf, and then walk away whistling.”

  Her heart was beginning to pound, her rising anger bringing a flush to her face, making her hand shake. Her mind was reeling, but suddenly she stopped it cold, catching herself, regaining control. He was provoking this, distracting her with her own fury, pushing her off balance.

  “Are they all like you in the CIA, Ramsey? Have they all had moral lobotomies like you? At least the others who’ve been as ruthless as you in this, Kuznetzov, Badim, Captain Paget, they did what they did for some comprehensible reason, to serve some rational end. You just do it because it can be done.”

  “Paget?”

  “You met him at my place in the Hamptons. A soldier. Poor Gwen’s friend.”

  He smiled, nodding. “So that’s how you managed that U.N. tour de force. I thought that was beyond your capabilities. I hadn’t expected you’d be able to find help, certainly not help that talented. Yet another agenotypic blundering.”

  He was studying her, his dark-lashed eyes filled with caution and cunning, the cheetah in the grass raising his head to plot his run. He glanced at her pistol, the quick look so penetrating she half feared he could tell it no longer held ammunition.

  “We can talk this out, Tatiana. Let me get you a drink. You’re always good for a drink.” He started to rise.

  “No. Keep away from me!” She moved slightly forward, lifting the pistol for better aim. “Get over there, by the galley. Move, damn you!”

  Her tone intimidated him just enough. Rising again, moving carefully to the side and backward, he did as she said, his eyes never leaving her.

  “A gin and tonic, Tatty. A Scotch. A Cuba libre. I’ve so much booze aboard it’s ballast. Come on. One last frosty drink.”

  As he moved to the galley, she herself moved to the short ladder leading to the cockpit and afterdeck. She put a foot on the step, holding the pistol as menacingly as possible.

  “We’re quits, Ramsey. You live, I live. You go your way, I’ll go mine. Just don’t ever cross my path again.”

  She climbed backward, step by step, their eyes in a tense, desperate marriage. With left foot finally on the deck, she moved back quickly to the rail. As she expected, he came to the companionway, peering out. He put his hands on the brass grips on either side, gaining leverage enough to propel himself rapidly forward.

  Tatty threw the pistol hard into his face, striking him in the forehead. It was the first injury she had caused Ramsey in all her life. A joyful release exploded inside her like some powerful potion as the gun struck. She did not linger to watch the blood flow. Joy evaporated, leaving animal fear. She hurtled over the rail, landing on her knees on the breakwater, but quickly rising, running, head down in the fastest wind sprint she had ever run.

  Ramsey had not cried out. He would recover quickly. It was possible he might pause to snatch up the pistol and quickly check to see if it was loaded, if it had indeed been a bluffing game. But his mind was too quick for that. He could leave that indulgence until later. He would move immediately to take up a weapon he was sure of and come scrambling after her. She likely had only seconds.

  She reached the end of the breakwater at full gallop, leaping up onto the quay, stumbling, careening on toward the body of the longhaired man and then tripping again, falling, sprawling, rolling. Shaking her head, ignoring a twisted ankle and more screaming pain in her knees, she scrambled over the concrete and grabbed up the dead man’s pistol, a long-barrelled automatic with a heavy grip. She had no idea how much ammunition it still contained, but was sure it was not empty.

  She jerked her head up, ready to fire at a hulking Ramsey Saylor only a few feet away, but there was no one. He had not followed her. He had used the time to slip the lines and free his boat from the breakwater. In a moment, she heard the engine start. She rose as the graceful craft, Ramsey a shadowy figure at the wheel, turned in an arc and began to move with increasing speed toward the two exits that would take it out of Dockyard into the sea.

  Quickly, she found the release for the pistol’s clip. It was still heavy with bullets, and she guessed there was a round yet in the chamber. She slammed back the clip, but did nothing further. He was too far away. She had in fact let him live.

  While her voice carried on their grotesquely absurd conversation in the cabin of Ramsey’s boat, her mind had been dealing with the future. She had one more move to make. Though her most human, fearing instincts impelled her to run down the long quay to the British ship and whatever sanctuary it might provide, a more dutiful impulse kept her back. What she needed most, needed fast, was a telephone with which to contact the Russians. They had trawlers and fast submarines all along the coast. She had read an article about them in a recent Newsweek. If she told the Soviets Ramsey’s plans, his location and probable course, it would be the same as delivering him up, almost the same. It ought to be enough of the bargain to free Jack Spencer. It was as much as they could rightly ask.

  Ramsey was raising his mainsail. If he headed east upon emerging from Dockyard,
he’d have a beam reach on a strong north wind. He’d have good speed and a long head start. He’d have a huge mid-Atlantic into which to disappear. If he were to go west and south to the Bahamas and the Caribbean, however, he’d have to first tack his way up against that strong north wind. He’d be slowed.

  But she’d have to go all the way back to her hotel for a phone to use, nearly an hour’s drive on her motorbike, if it was still functioning. Turning, trotting, her breath very hard now, she hurried along the roadway back toward the slope that had taken her to the top of the fortress wall. She climbed up, slipping and sliding, at last finding the cycle upended by a big rock, its front wheel prominent in the moonlight, and very bent.

  She sank to the ground and began to sob. She cried and cried, like some little girl whose mommy had scolded her with unusual violence. Then at once she stopped, cursing her tears away, standing again and looking down the hill at Ramsey’s boat moving through the Dockyard basin, clenching her fists.

  The Russians might no longer care. They might be seeking Ramsey only as benefactors, intent on rescuing a once-useful agent who had played the wrong side in a power struggle but was still of value. They might have nothing in the area that could find him in time. Jack Spencer might already be dead. She could be sure of nothing.

  She could not leave it at this. She could not leave Gwen hanging from her own staircase, leave Cyril in his pool of blood, Griuchinov bleeding into the crushed ice, the young grand duchesses lying bullet-ridden in the Ekaterinburg basement. This had to end somewhere; this chain of death after death had to be broken. She would try now, at this place, this time. She would not let Ramsey Saylor, who had affected so much of her life, intrude himself on anyone else’s. She would purge the infection.

  “It doesn’t matter if you don’t make it, Tatty. What matters is that you try.”

  What strange, warm, ancient voice had said that to her? Her father, her real father, Bobby Shaw—sun-creased face, short gray hair, the strongest hands and arms she had ever touched, the gentlest voice she had ever heard, slow and Southern. It had been a school race, kindergarten or first grade, on some air force post. She’d fallen down, and all the others had scampered on past her. She’d gotten up and finished the race last of all, crying. Some of her classmates began laughing at her.

  She’d try. She’d already thought of a way.

  Once again climbing the wall, she found a place to drop to the other side, then ran to the keep and its pond with the outboard motorboat. Releasing the painter, clambering to the stern, she pulled hard on the starting cord, too hard. She fell back into the boat’s bottom, her blouse wet from the standing water. She tried again, and again. The sixth time the engine sputtered, then caught. She pushed herself away from the stonework, shifting the motor into a slow speed forward and heading toward the wide iron gate, shifting again into neutral and coasting with a bump to a stop.

  The gate was held by a rope, thick and stout. The knot would be more than she could manage. Grasping it, she looked back into the boat bottom, in the ridiculous hope there might be a knife. There was not, of course, nothing at all sharp.

  Shaking her head hard into thought, she pulled the long-haired man’s pistol from the belt of her shorts. Putting the muzzle to the knot, she fired, blowing half of it away. Steadying the knot again, she shifted the aiming point and fired once more. The rope fell in two. Holding to the gate, shifting the outboard into reverse, she pulled the great antique frame back, much as British seamen might have done on some eighteenth-century mission.

  Pausing, Tatty caught her breath, then shifted into forward and high speed, plowing out to the windy sea.

  The boat was little more than a skiff, seaworthy though, with a sharp prow and wide beam. Calming herself, remembering that coconut shells crossed oceans, she turned the boat to climb the swells, remembering to turn the boat again at the last moment to take the bigger waves on the bow quarter, then falling off to renew her easterly progress.

  In the spreading moonlight, the sails of Ramsey’s boat were stark, knife-sharp silhouettes. He was not steering east. He was hellbent for the Caribbean. He was struggling hard in his tacks against the north wind, sailing close-hauled to the razor’s point short of irons, water and spray cascading over his bow with rhythmic redundancy.

  Ramsey was flying a huge Genoa jib. It made for frantic, arduous winching when he came about, but would carry him forth against the wind with greater speed and force. It also obscured his forward vision greatly.

  Crouching down into the watery boat bottom, her right elbow on the aftmost seat and her left hand holding the engine throttle and tiller, she steered her way toward him: tacking much as he was, hiding behind the elephantine swells, keeping her boat’s stern from a direct assault by the sea. Swinging in alternating zigs and zags, swinging widely apart, then extraordinarily close, then away again, the boats were actually on a collision course—if she worked it right.

  She did. She had pulled off to his port side, off his bow, just after he had come about onto a starboard tack. The big Genoa would keep her from view. She motored the little skiff sideways over a great heaving wave, accelerating forward until she was on an intersecting course, then turning sharply to starboard, closing directly, bow to bow. Shutting the engine down almost to idle, keeping just enough power to maintain steerage, she grabbed up the skiff’s painter and looped it. As the great, sail-laden boat of Ramsey’s drove steadily upon her, she steered the skiff abruptly to the side, taking the impact on the little boat’s beam, hooking the painter over a cleat with a quick, desperate action.

  He would immediately hear the thump, note the drag and the sudden weather helm.

  She flung herself up onto his deck, crawling, slithering, losing a boat shoe, until she gained the starboard side, clinging to a mast stay. Ramsey abruptly came about, winching the jib to the other side, rising to look at the skiff as its painter slipped off the cleat and it fell off and away. Then he saw her.

  “By God, Tatty, back for more? Do you love me so?”

  Tatty rose to one knee, gripping the cabin rail with her left hand as she emptied the automatic loudly into Ramsey. From the jerks of his body, she could tell she had hit him at least four times.

  Letting his body slip like ooze into the cockpit, she hurried to the helm, kicking his dead arm from where it had caught in the wheel. She yanked the main sheet free of its cleat, letting it play out, spinning the wheel as the boat fell off into a gentler point of sail that led back toward Bermuda. Settling finally into a run, the boom of the mainsail swung far out in the perpendicular, she looked down to examine Ramsey’s naked body as it sprawled in the moonlight. Through some perverse mischance or chance of fate, one shot had disfigured his “beautiful” face and another had destroyed his genitals.

  Tying the helm on a course sufficiently to port to avoid an unexpected and disastrous gybe, she pulled up the body and shoved it down the companionway into the cabin. Then she threw her pistol into the sea.

  The final maneuver required some nimbleness. She drove the yacht on toward the northern front of the Dockyard breakwater, spun the helm around through a violent gybe that almost capsized her, and then tied the wheel so the boat would go back out to sea. Then she rolled over the side, losing her other boat shoe, swimming frantically for a moment, then relaxing into a slow, surviving breast stroke.

  She clambered up the rocks and then up over the breakwater. There was a man standing on the quay, in a white suit with white hair. She recognized him as the man by the hotel beach the night before, and at the Canadian embassy dinner party. The CIA man.

  She got to her feet. He kept his place. They stood motionless, each observing the other’s dark figure in the silvery gray of the moonlight on stone. Then he began walking toward her.

  Tatty had nowhere to go. Nothing to fight with. No strength left for fighting. No strength at all; nothing but tears. Though even those were gone. She stood, shivering in her own thin arms. He came nearer. She lowered her head, waiting for
the death blow, the gunshot, the knife slash.

  He put his arm around her.

  “Come, Miss Chase. There’s a blanket in the car.”

  “You’re Mr. Lovelace,” she said, huddled within a warm knit Afghan against the corner of the seat, but still close to him, because of the smallness of the car. Another old man. She was much reminded of Griuchinov. And Badim.

  “Laidlaw,” he said, looking straight ahead. The driver, a very large man, drove the little car with precise grace, maintaining the same speed no matter whether they climbed or descended hills or rounded curves.

  Laidlaw turned to her. “I have some brandy. The sea must have been cold. Would you like some?”

  “Yes,” she said, still shivering. “Just for the cold.”

  He smiled. “I understand.” He handed her an elegant silver flask. She meant only to sip from it, but she drank almost a third of its contents.

  It helped. It warmed. It calmed.

  “What about my motorbike?” she asked, finally—as it occurred to her, ridiculously.

  “My associates are tending to it, among other things. Don’t worry, it will be at your hotel’s garage in the morning.”

  “And those men I killed?”

  “We shall leave them where they are. They will make Mr. Saylor’s fate more explicable, in their way. And they shall certainly preoccupy the Bermudan police authorities. We intend to have you out of here on a morning flight, before they can quite collect themselves.”

  “And Ramsey?”

  “We shall let him sail on, until within the jurisdiction of our own Coast Guard. These dead men share a certain common denominator, or uncommon denominator. Their sexual preference. And there will be substantial evidence of a narcotics enterprise. We’ll have added to it, of course, but Mr. Saylor had a fair-sized stock aboard. He was a cocaine addict, or didn’t you know?”

  “I didn’t.” She gripped the flask. She began to cry.

  “What is it, Miss Chase?”